


Good Morning Heartache

by mzhlf



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: 1940s and 50s, Bisexuality, Coming Out, F/F, F/M, Historical AU, Homophobia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-05
Updated: 2017-07-05
Packaged: 2018-11-23 19:41:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11408892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mzhlf/pseuds/mzhlf
Summary: General Danvers Week 2 - Day 3 - Historical AUIn which a housewife in the 50's enjoys fiction, grapples for purpose, and ponders the definition of love. WIP.





	Good Morning Heartache

**Author's Note:**

> Alright, as of 7/6, I'm setting this to WIP, because this is getting a rewrite.
> 
> I'm still going to leave this link up for GDW, but if you're reading this for the first time, I'd advise you to click the back button. Or lower your expectations. This will be a piece I'd want to share without this kind of a warning at some point. It's just not there yet.

Her name was Eva.

She sat one row in front of Astra, a seat over to the left, with her smooth brown hair in an elegant updo that accentuated her long, graceful neck. Astra’s eyes would sometimes drift to the little round birthmark where her neck meets her shoulder, peeking out like a sunrise from the neckline of her dress.

Eva didn’t talk much, though what little she did say looped through Astra’s head for days. Very rarely did she look to friends for consensus or approval: she knew what she thought of most things, though she only articulated her opinions when asked. It wasn’t meekness. She simply had her perspective and didn’t care to check if other people agreed. This unnerved some of the adults, who became quieter and made faces whenever she came up in conversation, but Astra thought she was the best.

Eva ate her lunches alone with an open book, sitting by the big oak tree at the back of the school. Astra never normally lacked for confidence, but she couldn't bring herself to ask if she could join her, mostly because she’d never been quite so afraid of being turned away. This new shyness was more than a little strange to her, and it would be more than twenty years before she was finally able to explain it in hindsight.

Sue Jenkins said that Eva liked jazz and blues, that she rode the train for twelve hours to see Lady Day perform in New York City. (Astra wasn’t eavesdropping per se - she just subtly bent in closer the moment she heard her name, nothing out of the ordinary really.)

She spent a year’s worth of pocket money on a single vinyl.

Later that night while her mother made a social call, she carefully set it onto the turntable and let the melancholy trumpets and Billie Holiday’s tender voice carry her away to a world of their own. Exquisite longing seeped through her skin and permeated her heart, languished inside her until it became hers. Or perhaps... it simply reached into her, uncovered what was already there and shaped it into something poetic.

Astra wondered if Eva had felt a similar transformation, if perhaps she was moved by this even though she seemed so untouchable. Was she listening now? Did she exist beside her in that same shade of color?

Astra saved more pocket money and bought more music, and kept the vinyls carefully hidden in a pocket beneath her clothes drawer. Her mother hated jazz music, said it was made for heathens and degenerates. Astra supposed that was fair. Whenever her mother was away, it taught her the secrets of shapeshifting, brought her out of her own skin and allowed her to briefly inhabit someone else’s, permitted her to see inside their heart.

That same year, Eva no longer brought books to lunch, opting instead to share her company with a boy. Astra never knew resentment until Jack came along with his neat blonde hair, all decked out in his tailored suits, pulling up by the side of the street in his father’s big shiny Cadillac.

Of course Astra hated him: he was rich. That ostentatious displays of wealth never looked so irksome on anyone else was beside the point. Any other explanation would have been unthinkable.

* * *

Astra’s mother had always been stern and fervently religious. Every Sunday they’d put on stiff dresses and go to church, and after the service was over, the members of the church gossiped like crowded buses in the summertime stank, flapping their lips about neighbors standing as close as ten feet away.

There were certain topics that brought everyone together, of course. Any mention of city lifestyles was always met with disapproving frowns and upturned noses, especially after the end of the War. _Unnatural_ , they’d hiss about the women who refused to return to their lives at home. _Godless_ , they’d spit about people who had the audacity to redefine the nuclear family.

Astra regurgitated all the right phrases on all the right cues, with conviction and not a shred of anxiety.

What she felt for Eva, while exceptional, was not unique. By the time she was seventeen, several girls and several boys had caught her eye in a similar manner.

Astra assumed that falling in love and proceeding through the obligatory stages of marriage and children was a bit like learning grade-school math. You assigned some arbitrary definitions in order to have a set of clearly defined rules, and if a person you fixated on happened to be of the opposite sex, you called it love.

When a handsome older boy that she kind of liked asked if she wanted to go driving with him one weekend, she said yes. It hardly seemed relevant that she’d been setting her alarm clock five days a week just to wave to Rosemary who rode her bicycle to those early 7 A.M. shifts at the hospital.

* * *

Astra married him when she was twenty-two. They moved closer to the city and fell into a comfortable routine. She cooked. She ironed. They made love once or twice a week and she liked it more often than not. She kept the house clean while he went to work, paid her social dues to the other wives in the neighborhood, and read books to pass the time.

Her social dues were significantly diminished after she found out she couldn’t get pregnant. There was only so much _oh you poor thing_ any well-rested person could withstand, much less an insomniac.

Old churchgoers in her hometown played on a reel to the backdrop of Non’s snoring. Her mother’s was on the ceiling while the night faded like a bruise. _If living naturally is having children_ , she asked the images, _then am I purposeless? Will I have lived for nothing?_

In these moments, it sometimes occurred to her that maybe asking Eva if she could sit with her beneath that tree wouldn’t have been so scary after all, because the prospect of receiving an answer now terrified her so much that she filled her mind with other people’s thoughts.

Astra found work at the library and lost herself in vivid imagination just as Non lost himself in his research. They spent entire weeks with _welcome home honey_ and _pass the potatoes_ as the full extent of their conversation, even during their outstandingly consistent once-or-twice-a-week sex.

Astra grew her record collection and kept it in a luggage case for hour-long travels to other worlds. At one point early on in their courtship, she’d envisioned herself enjoying them with Non. But he thought music was a waste of time, and his put-upon sighs didn’t harmonize very well at all with Dean Martin’s smooth, crooning vocals.

On overcast days, Astra felt cold beneath the bones. On days she listened to Romantic composers, she felt a little sad. When books couldn’t pull her out of her skin, she entertained a fleeting fantasy of packing a few dresses into that suitcase and leaving a note. Fleeting, because visions of train rides across vast fields invariably soured into guilt.

Non never staggered home drunk past midnight like Tom two doors down. Non never left bruises around her neck like the kind Barbara across the street had to cover up. If he kept a mistress, he cared enough to be sufficiently discreet.

Her life wasn’t wonderful. But neither was it terrible.

Until the library hired someone to share her shift.

* * *

Astra watched helplessly as a distracting concoction of high cheekbones and perfect skin approached the counter and set a black satchel bag down behind the chair, because of course she wouldn’t have the decency to check out a few books and be anyone other than her new coworker.

“Alexandra?” she asked, trying not to gaze too overtly at the cinched burgundy shirtwaist dress that flattered her slim physique.

“Alex,” the other woman replied, extending her hand. “And you must be the one showing me the ropes. Mrs. Moore, right?”

“Right - that is, if you were meeting my mother-in-law,” Astra quipped with a smile, which widened in alarmingly genuine happiness at Alex’s chuckle. Alex’s hand fit uncommonly well in hers, though her palm was, surprisingly, a little calloused. “Just Astra will do.”

Alex’s soft-looking lips stretched into a smile that warmed her pretty brown eyes, and it left Astra’s mouth uncommonly dry.

Astra liked to think she was fairly forgiving. If Alex had been vapid or disingenuous, the situation could have easily been salvageable. But her worst torments were yet to come.

* * *

Really, Astra should have seen it coming.

Her biggest reason for applying for work as a librarian was the proximity to all the books. When there were no shelves to be organized and no customers to be helped, she could help herself to all the reading material she wanted. Of course she should have considered the possibility of Alex choosing her occupation for similar reasons.

Astra was in the middle of _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ when Alex recognized the cover, and as it turned out, books were an excellent conversation starter. What started as a discussion about gothic horror shifted into thoughts on aging and mortality, which then veered into the life and public downfall of Oscar Wilde, which then turned into a debate over whether the Aesthetics Movement and whether art should be moralized.

For the first time since she could remember, Astra found herself smiling on her way home.

* * *

As the shared work hours continued, so too did their conversations. They started reading things together. Occasionally, one would read to the other. Sometimes, they struck upon a conversation topic so interesting that they would spend days at a time simply talking.

Alex was different from anyone she had ever met. Her father died in Germany when she was young and his superior in the Army raised her as his own and trained her to defend herself. She could deadlift 240 pounds. Even when she lifted stacks of books weighing considerably less than that, her arms tensed in a way that did strange things to Astra’s stomach.

The first time this happened, Alex had barely been working at the library for a week. Astra blamed her recent lack of practice in having conversations with real people. Now that she was forced to share her space with someone, she needed some time to adjust - or so she thought. But strangely, familiarity only ever seemed to exacerbate it.

Every piece of herself Alex revealed was consumed, fixated on, hoarded like a treasure and fed gently to an ever-growing flame.

Alex was bravely and unabashedly political. The old churchgoers would have hated her. She owned a pair of tailored trousers - _not men’s trousers,_ she was quick to correct _, I had them made and I’m a woman. Hence, a woman’s trousers._ Alex knew a touch of French, and had gotten about a tenth of the way through the original _Notre-Dame de Paris_ before throwing her hands up, having understood only about a third of it. She could recite pi to a hundred decimal places.

Alex liked Chet Baker, and sang a bit in her free time, though only when she knew she was alone. Astra had gone back to fetch her purse once when she heard her, and stood there, listening and smiling for a good five minutes before Alex noticed and blushed fiercely all the way up to the tips of her ears. A reckless, curious part of Astra wondered how warm her neck would feel if she pressed her lips to it.

Troublesome. That was how she felt about Alex: troublesome. Distracting. Maddening.

The day Astra found out that Colonel Jones was the only man in Alex’s life, she couldn’t stop smiling over dinner. Even Non noticed her spectacularly good mood, and he barely noticed much of anything. Astra though that it must have been the book she was reading earlier. Kafka was always such a delight.

Aside from having a wicked sense of humor and being fun to talk to, Alex was just plain nice. Once, after a fight with Non, Astra went to work late in rather dour spirits, and after her lunch, she returned to find a bunch of freshly picked wild flowers and a pretty little sketch of her Alex must have done while she was absorbed in reading.

And it all went downhill from there. Every little word and gesture became noticeable, however silly or mundane. The curve of her ear drove Astra to distraction. Her smiles produced pangs in her heart.

Astra had considered filing a complaint with their manager about her hazardous work environment. It was unreasonable to expect anyone to function at full capacity under these conditions. But the only thing worse than being around Alex Danvers was not being around Alex Danvers, so she dealt with her adverse circumstances the best she could. And if a couple of books got mislabeled, or she gave herself a few paper cuts, or she forgot what she was doing from one minute to the next, she had no choice but to accept her lot in life.

Her time at home passed in a daze. She still cleaned on Saturdays and went to church on Sundays. Occasionally she’d visit her mother. She reserved her best dresses for work days. As a librarian, she had a responsibility to the community to inspire people to read, and it certainly would be inappropriate for her to look unkempt. And if she stole back a couple of admiring glances back from a fellow librarian, that just meant she was doing her job.

It had never exactly been uncommon for her mind to drift during lovemaking, but more and more work-related thoughts invaded during inopportune moments. Fortunately, what she lacked in focus, her body compensated for with its innate instincts, for more than once did she approach satisfaction as soon as Alex’s face appeared in her mind.

* * *

Astra had never really been close to her mother. Most of the townsfolk seemed to assume otherwise. _Oh, you must miss Fred terribly_ , she’d overhear on Veteran’s Day. _Well, at least you have little Astra to keep you company._

 _She is the last I have of him_ , her mother would concede, _if only she had even an ounce of his sense._

 _Oh, you don’t really mean that,_ they’d chuckle, if they were feeling charitable that is. Other times, they’d offer up helpful advice like _more chores_ or _fewer books_ . _Idle hands make mischief,_ they’d warn. _Young ladies shouldn’t read too many fanciful stories_ , they’d say.

And Hannah was nothing if not a product of the town in which she grew up. As one of their primary organizers, she embodied their lifestyle and politics. So when Astra received the telephone call, there was a not insignificant part of her that wished to stay exactly where she was, familial guilt be damned.

But after decades of, _don’t forget who you are young woman, I fed you and clothed you since you were nine years old, the least you can do is show some gratitude, if your father were here he would beat the fear of God into you,_ Astra carried a high definition vinyl record of all her mother’s favorite reproaches wherever she went. It was her least favorite and most frequently played of all the music she owned, and as much as she tried to unplug the cord, break the disc or turn down the volume, it kept on going like a music box on a loop in an unbreakable cage that she didn’t have the keys to.

After about two days of it threatening to shatter her eardrums while she slept, she quit her job and went back home. Non didn’t think to go with her, and Astra didn’t think to ask him. They didn’t speak much the day before she left. It wasn’t that they were angry or unhappy, they just never had much to say. They went to sleep with their backs facing each other, and he was gone for work before she woke up.

Alex, though? Oh, Alex was the most difficult to say goodbye to by far. During her last day of work, they hugged for about twenty minutes, until some customer checking out a book cleared his throat and they broke apart with not a dry eye between them, and Astra left waving dramatically in the wind with a heartfelt promise to write.

And write they did, about a letter each week, each one a bright spot of color that bled from the paper into Astra’s skin, permeating her nerves and settling warmly in her chest.

It honestly wasn’t so bad. The townsfolk were every bit as gossipy and sanctimonious as she remembered, and she missed Alex so much she sometimes couldn’t sleep. Letters were a poor substitute for proximity. But her mother…

Her mother surprised her.

She was deteriorating quickly. The illness aged her about a decade within a month, and maybe Astra pitied her, or maybe her sternness softened with her musculature, but she looked, if anything, worn out. Lonely, even

“Who was that singer you used to listen to?” she asked her once. “The one who wore the flower.”

“You mean Billie Holiday?” Astra guessed and frowned curiously at her mother’s nod. She’d found that record about a year or so after Astra bought it and there had been hell to pay. Even after forgoing dinner for an entire week, Astra never saw that record again.

“I’ve kept her in the bottom of the closet,” her mother said. “Why don’t you put her on?”

And sure enough, there was that old vinyl, the first one she bought with all her pocket money because Eva Waterson liked it. Astra started it on the turntable, her movements wooden, strangely petrified to be sharing those colors she once admired in secret with her mother of all people, shocked when she started nodding her head and humming along.

It felt genuine, even if it wasn’t an apology.

After _Good Morning Heartache_ came to an end, Hannah let out a sort of musing, thoughtful chuckle. She gazed at Astra, lifted a shoulder in a conceding, vulnerable sort of shrug. “That was lovely.”

Astra smiled.

“Who are they from? Those letters you’ve been getting.” Despite the queasy lurch in Astra’s stomach, it didn’t feel like her mother was demanding an answer.

“A friend I worked with at the library. Alexandra.” It was the truth, and yet it felt like a lie.

Her mother stared at her for a long moment, before nodding in comprehension. “You should invite her over for dinner soon. Maybe this Saturday?”

“I’ll see if she has anything planned,” Astra agreed, unable to suppress a smile at the prospect of seeing her again. Her mother closed her eyes with a smile on her lips, and it felt like a blessing that Astra hadn’t even known that she wanted.

* * *

The moment Alex stepped out of her car, Astra pulled her into a long hug. She sighed into their embrace, feeling like herself again for the first time since she left.

“You missed me, I take it?” It was meant to be a droll remark, but something in Alex’s voice made it sound like an entreaty.

“Like air,” Astra replied honestly.

* * *

Dinner went off without a hitch. Despite not having heard the best things about Astra’s mother, Alex was as charming as could be. She went to bed soon after they finished eating - she’d been turning in earlier and earlier - but before she left, she held Alex’s hands in hers for an entire five minutes, and all she said in that time was, “You’re a sweet child. Be good to her.”

* * *

They walked around town arm in arm and Astra pointed out all of her old haunts, so happy to be next to her again that she couldn’t care less if they’d turned a couple of heads. It was as if, by describing her memories of each place, she was able to render each structure in paints of her choosing. It made her feel strangely powerful, like the town was a product of her memories, rather than vice versa.

Her mother died not long after the visit.

By the time the memorial ceremony rolled around, rumors of Astra’s mysterious friend from the city had just about died down, but quickly started up again when Alex came down to attend it.

It took Astra a few days to get her mother’s last affairs in order. They had just packed up the car when a couple of old classmates noticed Astra in the driveway and walked over to say goodbye.

“I couldn’t help but notice that your friend doesn’t wear a ring,” one of the women said less than two minutes into the conversation, transparently fishing for gossip material. “She must be in her late twenties, early thirties?”

“True and true,” Astra answered straightforwardly, and shifted on her feet as they feigned surprise rather poorly.

“Really! Hmm. I can’t imagine she would have had any trouble finding a good man. Where did you say she was from?”

“Oh come off it Mary,” admonished her companion. “Our Astra knows better than to associate with the kind of person you're thinking of.”

“Do I?” asked Astra, and their smiles grew stiff upon their faces.

“Well, of course darling. We did go to Sunday school together, you remember don't you?" Old words like _unnatural_ and _ungodly_ passed unspoken between them.

Astra allowed herself a moment to honestly consider those unnamed feelings she had for Alex, She’d always known they were there. How could she not admit it now, when even her mother of all people had seen it?

Maybe it was love. Maybe love was art made manifest. Maybe it was the music of someone’s voice, the simple comfort of their presence. Maybe it was being enchanted by the version of yourself they saw in you. A bone-deep sense of belonging.

Or maybe love’s purpose was merely procreation. Maybe having a defective womb really did mean that Astra was incapable of loving anyone. But, if that were the case, then she probably wasn’t missing out on much.

And so, Astra merely shrugged. “Then maybe I need to found a new religion,” she said, and tilted her head with a polite smile. “Take care now.”

With that said, Astra got into the car where Alex sat waiting, pulled out of the driveway, and left the phantoms of her childhood standing there in silence.

**Author's Note:**

> Man, I wish I had more hours in a day because I would have really loved to flesh this out more and make sure it doesn't suck. I might actually do a rewrite at some point with a bit more time and research under my belt. But it's day 3 and I'm not going to have time to post tonight, so, here you are.
> 
> Feedback is always appreciated, constructive criticism doubly so. Any feelings or reactions or moments that stood out to you, I'd love to hear about it.


End file.
